Reference: How To Root an HTC Nexus One Running Android 2.3.6 on Linux

This recipe written in March 2012. Keep in mind that the techniques vary a lot over time.

I recently had to get my Nexus One phone repaired, which involved discovering 1) that to do so requires getting the phone’s data wiped and 2) you need a rooted phone to actually back up all of your data. It was too late to be able to back up my data, but as long as my phone came back wiped, I figured I’d make it so I was able to back things up thoroughly in the future. This is what I learned.

Rooting your phone is a pain in the ass. It took me a long time to figure out this recipe. Instructions online are usually some combination of confusing, outdated, inaccurate, or inappropriate. Most instructions reference XDA Developers Forum threads which are all of the above except more so, difficult to browse, and often filled with useless chatter. (I can see why they do the things they do, but there are a lot of drawbacks too.) Most of the rooting instructions are for Windows or Macs. The phone rooters using Linux are, in general, clearly not very familiar with the OS.

Rooting your phone voids your warranty and wipes your user data. Of course, if you still have a Nexus One, your warranty is probably long gone anyway. In some versions of Android, there are ways to gain root without losing your data, but my impression was that these are more difficult and rely on exploits that have been closed in Android 2.3.6. (By the way, Android 2.3.6 is in the “Gingerbread” series; as always, Wikipedia has a good table matching Android codenames and versions.)

That being said, here’s the recipe:

Preparatory work

Turn on data syncing on your phone in Settings → Privacy → “Back up my data”. I have no idea how long it takes for these data to get synced, so if the setting wasn’t on before, do this well in advance of actually rooting your phone.

Install backup software on your phone and use it. These back up various pieces of phone data to your SD card, which can then be transferred to your computer over USB. MyBackup Pro (non-free) seems to be the consensus choice. The whole point of this exercise is that without root you can’t back up everything, but you can back up a lot of important stuff like SMSes and call logs. MyBackup Pro wants you to create some online account but you can skip that part. (The hands-down favorite for general backup is Titanium Backup, but it requires root access, which we don’t have yet.)

Back up your phone’s SD card onto your computer using the USB cable. Free up at least 500 MB on the card to make room for backups. (The backup tool won’t run if you have less than this amount free, so it’s not like you can get away with less if you don’t have much installed.) These backups will include the phone data backups you just made inside rerware/ on the SD card (if you used MyBackup Pro).

Install the Android SDK. Once the tarball has been unpacked, you need to run tools/android to get a GUI that will let you install many of the components actually needed to do stuff with the phone. Be sure to install the components for the correct version of Android API. Version 2.3.3/API 10 worked for me. You can skip all of the vendor-specific packages (some of which take a long time to download). In the end, the programs platform-tools/adb and platform-tools/fastboot should be available.

Download a “recovery image,” which is a tool that lets you boot into an alternate OS that lets you monkey around with your phone. These all seem to be posted on XDA Developers. They have a Nexus One Recovery Images wiki page that allegedly collects such images. “Amon_Ra’s Recovery” version 2.2.1 worked for me: the file’s called recovery-RA-passion-v2.2.1.img and I got it off this forum thread. Just to be clear, many of the following steps assume that you’re running this recovery image or a very similar version thereof.

Download a “superuser utility,” which is a combination of Android software (“APK”) and some low-level OS hooks that almost all applications build on to do rooty things. There seem to be a ton of variants. Almost everybody links to the version mentioned on this XDA thread, but the version described there is incredibly out of date. If you trace the downloads, they lead to this listing page, which has more recent versions. The file called Superuser-3.0.7-efghi-signed.zip worked for me. (It was at this point that I realized that not only are Android OS versions named after desserts, but those names proceed in alphabetical order.)

Set up a udev file allowing the fastboot program to identify your phone. This seems a little silly but does appear to be necessary. I created a file named /etc/udev/rules.d/99-android.rulescontaining these lines:

The OWNER parameter should be substituted with your username. The syntax for these rules is apparently deprecated but whatever.

Unlocking the bootloader

Ensure that your SD card is backed up and you have 500 MB of free space on it. Prepare to lose all of your data.

Power off your phone. Disconnect it from the USB cable if it’s plugged in. (I haven’t verified that you need to do this, but other people’s instructions seem to suggest this.)

Boot it into the “fastboot” screen by holding down the trackball while pressing the power button. You should quickly get a little semi-textual menu screen.

Plug your phone into your computer with the USB. In the Android SDK, run platform-tools/fastboot oem unlock. If this complains about not being able to find your phone, your udev rule may not be functional.

A screen will pop up on your phone asking you if you Really Want To Do This. You do. Unless you don’t.

Magic will happen and your phone will boot up. You’ll see a little open lock icon at the bottom of the splash screen indicating that the bootloader is unlocked.

Get back to the fastboot menu: power off, disconnect USB, boot with trackball held, reconnect USB.

Run platform-tools/fastboot flash recovery /path/to/recovery-RA-passion-v2.2.1.img. This should succeed without errors.

In the fastboot menu, choose Bootloader.

In the bootloader menu, choose Recovery.

You should boot up into the special recovery mode. NB: I originally thought that after I flashed in the special recovery image (step 3B) I could boot into this special mode whenever I wanted. In my experience, it only works if you boot into recovery mode immediately after flashing the image. Otherwise I get a hard lock that requires popping out the battery to fix.

Monkeying around in recovery mode

Choose the “Nandroid backup/restore” menu option. Back up everything that seems reasonable. Since the bootloader unlock has just wiped your data, this won’t back up anything personal, but it’ll back up your phone OS in case you break things later.

Go back to the main menu (volume down key) and turn on “USB-MS”. (The USB cable should still be plugged in from the fastboot flash steps.) This will activate your phone as a USB filesystem.

In the main recovery menu, choose “Flash zip from sdcard”, and choose your superuser utility. It should print out some messages about what it’s doing. You’re now rooted.

In the main menu, reboot into the regular OS.

Demonstration of rootiness

Besides back up your data, one thing you can do while rooted is remove built-in applications. To get started, turn on “USB Debugging” in the Settings → Applications → Development menu on your phone, and plug in the USB cable.

In the Android SDK, run platform-tools/adb shell.

This is a tiny little busybox shell running on your phone. You can ls and see the contents of your phone’s builtin storage.

Running pm list packages -f will give you a list of installed packages and their corresponding APK files, which are found in this directory. To remove a package, first manually delete its APK file, then run pm uninstall [ident], where [ident] is the Java-style name of the package such as com.facebook.katana.

Close shell, disconnect USB, disable USB debugging, etc.

Cleanup

Your phone should now be booted into your regular, barely-initialized Android OS. Reinstall your backup program and restore backed-up data. If using MyBackup Pro, I found that I should not restore my calendar — all of my calendar events got duplicated. I also got messages about massive deletion of my contacts, and I’m pretty sure I should have chosen not to restore those either. At some point all of my Twitter “contacts” also got merged into my Google contact list, which was really annoying.

Begin the painstaking process of re-inputting all of your settings. There are a lot more than you thought.

Remove the udev rules file you created.

If you so desire, clean up some of the backups and things off your SD card.

Finally — the main point of all of this — after you’ve had a while to get all of your settings back, run a root-powered full backup of your phone data, and copy that backup off the SD card. Once you have root, consensus seems to be that Titanium Backup is the gold standard.

Here are some of the resources I used when piecing together all of this information:

One thought on “Reference: How To Root an HTC Nexus One Running Android 2.3.6 on Linux”

Some rooting methods involve just loading a modded android kernel, not the entire OS. This is why those methods don’t wipe out all your data. Usually these methods require strange low-level Windows-only utilities that are created for internal use by phone manufacturers. This is another example of my rule that “it’s handy to have an installation of windows around for when you need it.”

Comments are closed.

I’m an observational astronomer at Harvard interested in elegant software and data analysis.